Sunday, November 30, 2014

I should be writing code right now, should be doing that thing I get paid for, but instead I’m writing this post because, well, it’s been way too long. It’s funny, I had all these great plans at the end of last year, but...that thing they say about plans. Even now, I haven’t really trained in about two months, haven’t lifted in about three, and probably won’t get back to it until January, some commitments notwithstanding. Usually I write my year end review...closer to the end of the year, but hey, it’s December. This year has 31 days left to its credit, so that’s close enough.

Not sure it was a coincidence that this came across my desk when it did, but this was definitely the push that inspired me to start writing this (and if I do anything better next year, it’s seizing inspiration. Call it trite, but hey, it works for me):

I jive with the idea that you are what people perceive of you. That’s a thing, I’m not really into all this GenX/Y/Z/Millennial/whatever bullshit that “It doesn’t matter what people think of you, do what’s best for you and fuck everyone else,” or whatever other “motivational” type things people tend to post on their facebooks about how much they don’t give a shit (or what do the kids say “no more fucks to give”), you know, because loudly proclaiming your indifference through faux shows of independence is somehow a show of strength…

Oddly enough, that’s an issue I’m facing right now. I don’t care what most of the people around me think about me right now, and I DON’T LIKE THAT. I want to care what people think about me because yeah, it does make me be a better person (“Well you should just do it for yourself,” yeah, shut the fuck up). I LIKE when people have some sort of expectation of me, it gives me a clear target. Now, that’s not a blanket statement, sure, there are some expectations and some people whose expectations of me don’t matter (not that they won’t ever, they just don’t right now), but I’d be lying if I said I subscribed to the notion that expectations don’t matter.

I guess it’s not entirely true that I don’t care, I do care what most of my training partners think about me, I do like that people expect me to perform to a certain level in class, I do TAKE IT REALLY FUCKING SERIOUSLY that some folks in my Kaju class consider me the spiritual leader...and that’s what I always come back to. Training. I know I’ve fucked up when I’ve made decisions that take me away from training because to date I’ve never chosen anything that required a fundamental change to my training schedule that made me happy in the long run. Hell, I’ve been to both some really bright places and some really fucking dark places over the last year, and it’s cliche, but I always come back to training, without fail.

This year, I gotta admit (just to be a little goth, because why the fuck not), some of the darkness came back with me (poetic, right?). I realized one of the reasons I train is because so many people don’t, and some of those people, well...training makes me feel better than, no, it makes me feel superior to them. Yeah, I said it, and I’ll even go one more and say I NEED to feel superior to those people. How’s that for dark places? I went through a lot of personal shit this past year, as did many people I know, and the thing I learned is that everyone needs to deal with things the way they need to deal with things (or to take a small dig because that's where I am right now, I learned that "Bros before Hos" is TOTAL FUCKING BULLSHIT, thanks guys if you know who you are), and I’m cool with that. What I’m not cool with is people “doing what they need to do” and not giving a shit if that makes me uncomfortable, but then turning around and getting pissy when me “doing what I need to do” makes them uncomfortable. So that’s part of it. A big part of it. Yeah, it’s probably shitty, and “not alpha” as seems to be the thing to say nowadays, but it’s where I am, and I’ll work from here. So I need to get back to it. Kaju, Systema, Silat, Grappling, Weights, Conditioning, the whole nine. Especially Systema. Maybe I can breathe some of that darkness, that tension, back into myself like Martin was talking about.

Here are some expectation:

Wear my kaju brown belt at Vegas this year

Get my black belt in 2016

Help teach Silat again

Start that Systema study group

Get back on the instructor track for Systema

Finally take grappling seriously

Finally take teaching Kaju seriously

Hit all the seminars I've scheduled

Deadlift 500+ again

GET MY FUCKING SFG (this one's going to be tough)

Focus. It’s nice to have focus. It’s nice to have a standard to live up to. Because let’s be honest, as much as we all talk about living up to our own standards, our own standards are also the easiest to let slide. Don’t lie. My ego is definitely whispering in my ear saying that some of these expectations come from other people (which they probably don't, no one gives a fuck what I do, because that's what we do nowadays, right?), but it's what I need to do here now.

"...it's time to come home."

I don’t want to post this, but I’m going to. There are a few blogs I started following this year that have really changed my view on things, and recently I read a post on one wherein the author asks:

“Do you feel sick when you hit publish?”

I’m not going to recap the whole post, but you should read it, in fact, you should read the blog. This is a metric I'm going to hold myself to, because I do exactly the thing he calls out in this blog, artificially inflate. Hell, look at my facebook, it's all just art and training and no drama, which is cool, but is it complete? Not sure, but then, maybe facebook's not the venue for that anyway. So even though all I’ve done on this blog for the last year (the scant times I posted, anyway), is whine, if that's what I got, that's what I got. Here’s to the new year.